Spotify, Hulu Offer Joint Subscription to Lure More New Users

(Bloomberg) -- Spotify Technology SA and Hulu LLC are introducing a combined subscription that reduces the monthly price of using both, a promotion designed to draw new paying users to the music and video services.

Starting this summer, advertising-free music on Spotify Premium and the more than 75,000 television shows and movies on Hulu’s U.S. ad-supported service will be available for $12.99 a month, the companies said in a statement. On Wednesday, Hulu will begin offering a 99-cent trial subscription for its ad-supported plan for three months as an introduction to the bundle.

The package comes to less than the price of subscribing to the Spotify’s $9.99 a month service and Hulu’s $7.99 a month offering separately. Hulu, owned partly by Walt Disney Co., had about 17 million subscribers as of last year, while market leader Netflix Inc. surpassed 54 million in the U.S.

Spotify, which is said to be planning a new version of its free music service as well, expects to reach about 200 million users worldwide by the end of the year, including as many as 96 million paying subscribers, according to a March forecast. Technology giants Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. are all vying for a larger share of the music subscription market.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lucas Shaw in Los Angeles at lshaw31@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dave McCombs at dmccombs@bloomberg.net, Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Sam Nagarajan

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